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I use Wikipedia every day but what a surprise when I attempted to contribute! The existence of a reliable, free, online encyclopaedia is in itself an outright miracle. But it comes at a cost. There is a long learning curve to assimilate the dos and don'ts of editing plus compliance with NPOV (neutral point of view) and always citing sources for verifiability.

You would have guessed the 80/20 applies here: Over 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users (at the time: 524 people). Wikipedia incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory. It is not a dictionary, newspaper, or a collection of source documents.

60% of registered users never make another edit after their first 24 hours. Possible explanations are that such users only register for a single purpose, or are scared away by their experiences. Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk pages, implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders will target their contributions as a threat. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs; the contributor is expected to build a user page, learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to an arcane dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references." The majority of editors are male, aged 18 to 30, graduates, without partner or children. That blows out of the water the assumption they would have been retired academics...

Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing graphic sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films found on its articles. Child protection campaigners say graphic sexual content appears on many Wikipedia entries, displayed without any warning or age verification. Articles rival in quality the best from the commercial sector. A 2008 study gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 2006 to January 2008) in each field:

* Culture and the arts: 30% (210%)
* Biographies and persons: 15% (97%)
* Geography and places: 14% (52%)
* Society and social sciences: 12% (83%)
* History and events: 11% (143%)
* Natural and the physical sciences: 9% (213%)
* Technology and the applied science: 4% (-6%)
* Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%)
* Health: 2% (42%)
* Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%)
* Thought and philosophy: 1% (160%)

WikiScanner revealed changes made by anonymous editors were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work. In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits (e.g. 'watchlist's and 'recent changes'), computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits, blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges. For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them, or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes. Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue.

Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition. The presence of politically sensitive materials also led the People's Republic of China to block access to parts of the site.

To wrap-up thanks to all you guys at Wikipedia for a wonderful masterpiece. (Parts of this article are sourced from this wiki page)

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